


Home

by spinsterclaire



Category: A Song of Ice and Fire - George R. R. Martin, Game of Thrones (TV)
Genre: Drabble, Gen, Headcanon, One Shot, Post - A Dance With Dragons, Post - The Winds of Winter, Reunions, Winter
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-02-08
Updated: 2014-02-08
Packaged: 2018-01-11 14:36:00
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,290
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1174237
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/spinsterclaire/pseuds/spinsterclaire
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>After the final battle against the White Walkers, the world is quiet and most are dead. Bran, still alive, finds two people that bring him home.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Home

**Author's Note:**

> I have no idea what this is, but I liked the idea of this part of the story coming full-circle (I mean, it basically started everything, no?). I didn't include many details about "the final battle" that came right before this fic because that wasn't my focus, so just imagine what you want. (My mind pictures a Narnia-esque war, omg don't look at my basic self.)
> 
> On another note: I'm afraid this is about the happiest ending we can hope for for our beautiful golden twinsies. :(

The world is dressed in only white, sky and land both indistinguishable seas of silken ivory. There is no sun just as there is no moon – only a vast blankness that the winter has laid upon the Kingdoms’ shoulders. _There once were castles, villages, and trees in these parts_ , a wolf remembers. But now there is nothing and no one amidst the bleached landscape.

Perhaps, though, he thinks, these things still remain, buried somewhere deep beneath the heavy cloak of snow crunching underfoot. Maybe under it all still lies the remnants of people’s lives – a broken locket, a fallen home, a child’s doll… _But do they really exist when no one can see them?_

Such are his thoughts as he proceeds in his hunt.

He is a spot of gray amongst the white, a beast running across the land with paws brushing the very tops of the ground. In a different form the chill might have left his limbs creaky and stiff, but as a wolf, his fur keeps the cold at bay.

To the human eye there is only the infinite nothingness stretching out in front of him, and it appears to end neither here nor there. But the wolf knows there is more to the white than merely that…When he bends to sniff the ice, he can smell it all clearly: a pungent cocktail of fear and sorrow and lives cut short. He feels it, too, as he glides across the field towards the endless void, and he wonders if it’s possible to get drunk off another’s pain and blood.

The wolf thinks he hears muffled cries and final puffs of breath, the slow rhythm of heartbeats and the _whoosh_ of souls leaving their bodies. _Is there even a god to welcome them?_ he wonders.Can _there be a god – a Seven, a R’hollr, a set of Old Gods – after everything that’s happened?_ The howling of the wind is the only reply, and it is a loud shriek that echoes all around him: _no, no, no, no_.

He does not know where he is, but he seeks a familiar face – a recognizable shock of frozen hair, a ripped house sigil, just a piece of something that will mend his ragged edges. He needs an anchor to reassure him that this had once been real – his life, his family, his kingdom – and that it was not just another green dream blurring the lines between reality and fantasy.

 _Home,_ the wolf thinks, _I am looking for home._

After all, where else can one go when all is lost?

He searches and he searches – thinking of cobalt eyes and gleaming swords and blood, all the while – but he does not dare to stray too far from whence he came. The sting of pain in his gut radiates throughout his body with each bound and leap, and he knows that he cannot go much further. He must reserve what little strength he has left for the journey back to camp.

It is as he returning to the others that he finds them, the two gray-blue corpses, lying there lifelessly on a sheet of white. He knows their scent, had once smelled it every time he closed his eyes and dreamt of towers and lovers and the pull of gravity. He pauses to stop and stare at these people who are so familiar and yet so foreign in all their frigidity and coldness. Their faces are hard as stone, their eyes are empty and their hair is all icicle-daggers, but he is sure it is them. _Of course_ he knows it is them.

The wolf marks the territory so that he can return at dawn.

~

Bran wakes to the sound of Meera’s snoring, and he struggles to prop himself up with his arms. Pain shoots through his limbs once more, though the ache is duller within the numbness of his human skin, and he remembers the arrow piercing his stomach days before. Bran looks around their makeshift shelter, catching sight of the smoking pit covered in ash, and he hopes there is enough dry wood to start another fire. They will need the blaze more than ever today.

He had led them all there, his small band of three (himself, Meera, and Jojen) and troupe of forest children, but most had disappeared or died as they had fought against the relentless storm.  

Every greenseer had seen the truth: war was fast approaching and would spare not a single soul, high-born, low-born, or otherwise.

“You must travel south,” one of them had said, “And tell all what you know. Deliver them to safety, Bran.” But by the time he had reached the Riverlands it had already been too late, the blood having already stained the land and the dead rising and killing with a vengeance. It had been every woman and man for himself and Bran can still see small children falling limply, their mothers weeping as they fought off the attackers.

Stark, Tyrell, Martell, Bracken, Lannister, Greyjoy alike – they had all been flesh and bone, victims of their own mortality, and Death had come for each and every one of them. Some had been stilled permanently but not all, Bran knows, and he imagines the ghost of a Karstark slicing him in half with a rusted axe.

“Meera,” Bran says loudly, “Jojen.” His companions rub their eyes of the sleep that had settled there during their slumber before they turn to Bran with expectant faces.

“What is it, Bran?” Meera asks, and he finds it odd to hear his own name said aloud when deafening silence is all he;s heard for days. None of them have spoken since they'd seen their world fall apart , each living a silent existence of eating, walking, sleeping, and _surviving_.

“I found something in the night,” he tells them, and both of their eyes light up in recognition. _Home._

“Very well,” Jojen says quietly, standing up to start a fire. The dry wood is wrapped snuggly inside a roughspun cloak they’d lifted from one of the dead, and Bran sighs in relief at the sight of it. “Lead the way.” Jojen’s body has become frailer with the passage of time and treading of a thousand miles, Bran notices, and he realizes that they cannot afford to stick around much longer. Idleness would not be their friend in these conditions, and so they set out once they gather their things.

They find the bodies after an hour of searching, the glimmer of steel catching Bran’s attention through the torrent of snow falling from the sky. _The gods are angry_ , Bran thinks as it drowns them whole, but then he catches himself: _There are no gods. Only Death._

“Here,” he motions to the ground below, and Meera lowers him so that he is resting on his stomach. The wet-cold feels good as it seeps into his wound and it soothes the hurt until he feels nothing at all. He remains in this numb peace for a while, observing the two dead people sprawled out before him. He brushes the snow off of them to reveal their faces.  _Home, home home._

One of the fallen has the faint stubble of a beard growing upon his frozen chin, while the other’s is smooth and bare. Bran looks at them and sees two lifeless beasts, a pair of lions whose teeth had once been feared throughout the Seven Kingdoms. They are silent now, though – tamed – and there is no one around to fear their roar.

 _Will they thaw and live again, come summer?_ Bran wonders. It is a story his Old Nan might have told him as a young boy, when she’d lull him to sleep with whimsical tales of resurrections and immortality. But Bran is no longer a small child – he is nearly sixteen now, a man grown – and so he pushes the thought aside. He knows that this is the winter that will never end and that summer would never come again.

Bran looks at the bodies a little bit closer, crawling forward on his elbows to see their faces more clearly. Both of the corpses have their hair cropped short and both are also clad in steel, though Bran knows that while one is a man, the other is actually a woman.

 _She looks different without a long mane of gold and with the armor hiding her body_ , he thinks, _More like her brother_. She is smaller but no less fierce than the man beside her, and Bran wonders what it must have been like to see her fight with a sword. He has never seen a lady in battle, but if there was ever a bloodthirsty woman, it was this one. He finds it appropriate that they should both go like this, side by side and identical.

Bran studies the brother next. When his eyes catch sight of the hand, anger blooms inside him. It is golden and lying separately from the stump it is meant to conceal, having become severed from the man’s nubby wrist during his final struggle for life. It rests between him and his dead sister, its hard, steely fingers slightly bent in a way that make it seem as if they are caressing the lady’s foot. It is a last-ditch attempt at unity, togetherness – _wholeness –_ as though they could neither live nor die apart.

Bran looks away from the golden appendage and moves to touch the corpse’s stump instead. He slowly runs his hand over the icy skin, disturbed that something once so full of strength should be so powerless now. After all, the man had killed with this hand and loved with this hand, had commanded with this hand and sent a boy to his almost-death with this hand.

Funny, though, Bran muses, how the hand was gone but his legs were still useless.

The man and woman’s eyes are no longer the emeralds they had been in life, but have instead turned into grey glass marbles that stare, unseeing, up at the sky. But there is no need for sight anyways, the whiteness surrounding him confirms - for there is nothing to see here and no gods to beseech there.

Bran had looked at those green eyes once, had trusted them for a moment before recognizing the rage and the fear within them. They were the last things he remembers seeing as an able-bodied boy.

“Bran,” Meera implores, “What should we do?”

He outstretches his arms and rests the pads of her fingers upon the man and woman’s foreheads, feeling the frost melt into a dewy film beneath his touch. It is an odd blessing of sorts, but it is not the gods that Bran invokes when he looks to up at the vast whiteness above him. Instead, he imagines colors and stripes, hues of blue and red and gold that paint the great canvas alive once more.

Bran pretends that he is back in Winterfell – with his parents and his siblings and their pack of direwolves prowling territorially around the yard. He thinks of the time they had hosted the royal family, the day when the fat king had strode through the gates and the queen had dismounted from her carriage with a cold stare. He recalls Joffrey’s sneer and the knight’s smug smirk and the way they had all flit about the castle like golden, immortal gods. It was a lifetime ago, but Bran still hears the din of the great hall later that night. The sound of his mother’s laughter, the clanking of cutlery, the boisterous singing of the guests. Most of all, though, Bran remembers the following day: the feeling of stones beneath him, the strength of his arms and legs, the green eyes and that smug smirk again and the queen’s fear and falling, falling, falling…

It is _home_ he is feeling now, and it is the people who took everything away from him that finally return Bran to this place he’s been longing for. He finds himself wishing he had stumbled across someone else but maybe this is what is just, he muses, maybe this is a way to put it all behind him.

He could neither forget nor forgive the two people in front of him, but he _could_ send them off to somewhere else, somewhere far away where they could be together without shame or sin or dishonor clouding their name. Perhaps there they could love each other openly, and the small boy that discovers them would be able to keep his legs and climb back down to the ground, silent and uncaring.

With his palm against the woman warrior’s face – _the queen_ , he reminds himself, though she is nothing like the woman he knew – and hate flowing through his veins, he sees it all play before him, real and almost tangible: _home, home home._ His life had not been a lie and these dead lions are his proof.

Bran gingerly closes the woman’s eyes and does the same with the man’s. _Let them rest_ , he thinks, _Let them all rest._

“Burn them,” he orders, and Meera steps forward with a lit torch to let the flames lick the bodies black.

He is not burning the twin corpses as an offering to the false Seven, a gift to the deaf Old Gods, or a sacrifice to the nonexistent R’hollr. And as they burn he realizes, too, that he doesn’t care where they go or who they are or what they did. What's done is done.

Bran burns them only to see the speck of color, the blue meld with the orange, in the endless ocean of white. He does it to streak the world around him in shades of home.

_Home, home, home._


End file.
